Simple Misconception (Jordan James, PI Series)

by Rachel Sharpe

  With much effort, I stumbled out of bed, past my irate sister, and down the hall to the bathroom. When I finally managed to reach it, I didn’t vomit, but did collapse onto the cold, tile floor, leaning against the garden tub for support. I shut my eyes as my head throbbed with pain. It felt like someone was hitting it was a mallet. Suddenly, I sensed a presence beside me.

  “I can’t believe you.” The light to the bathroom switched on. I squeezed my eyes shut so tight I thought they might sprain. Thankfully, Alicia noticed my agony and had the decency to switch it off again. I hoped that would be the end of it, that I might be left to suffer through this nauseating misery alone, but no. “Jordan, you’re drunk.”

  “No,” I argued, sliding down the length of the tub and curling up into a ball on my mother’s plush new Vera Wang bathmat. “I’m not drunk. Just tired.”

  “You’re right. You’re way past drunk now. You’re hung over.”

  “I’m so not . . .”

  “Nausea, sensitivity to light . . .”

  “Alicia . . .”

  “. . . tiredness . . .”

  “. . . will you just . . .”

  “. . . headache . . .”

  “Stop! Please!” My hands found their way to my face again. I began to massage my temples, praying that the bongo drum pounding a Caribbean beat inside my head would stop. Swallowing hard, I opened one eye. I found her staring down at me with a look that was a mixture of contempt and pity. “Alicia, just . . . don’t.”

  “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “Punishment for my very existence?”

  “I’m here because Mom called me last night at two in the morning, hysterical. First, you blew off the Christmas pageant. She got over that, but when you didn’t come back by midnight, she began to worry. Then, dad got a call from Sergeant Ron.”

  “Who?” I continued to rub my temples. No relief.

  “Sergeant Ron. With New Orleans PD?” She paused. “Come on, Jordan, you haven’t been gone that long.”

  “The guy from church?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, Dad gets a call saying that Mom’s car is being impounded. It was illegally parked on Decatur Street. Dad assumed you were arrested. Or worse. At that point, she flipped. I mean, totally lost it. She called me up in tears saying you were missing. You weren’t answering your phone. Jordan, it was bad.”

  “Uh . . .” I trailed off. For the first time since I woke up, I thought about the night before. Unfortunately, putting forth any effort, mental or otherwise, was proving to be quite a challenge.

  “Do you even remember last night? Where you were? Who you were with?” Alicia knelt beside me, staring into my eyes. “Are you on drugs?”

  “Is that even a question?” I groaned, rolling over slowly. I climbed to my knees. Although it didn’t help my aching head, it also didn’t make it worse. Progress.

  “Do I sound like I’m joking?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know what you would sound like if you were joking because you never joke.” I gripped the tub and pulled myself into a sitting position. More progress.

  “This isn’t funny, Jordan. Mom’s car is impounded! Do you know how much that costs?”

  “Put it on my tab.”

  “Jordan!”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, resting my back against the tub. I took a deep breath and looked at Alicia. My very pregnant older sister was awkwardly kneeling beside me, wearing a frown that rivaled the ones she gave me when I was younger. “Sorry about the car. Sorry I caused so much trouble. Sorry . . . for all of it.”

  “I’m not the one you should be apologizing to.” She continued to glare at me. It made me feel like I did whenever I got caught in high school. It was bad enough having your parents grill you. Having your older sister do it, too, was way worse. Now, I feel compelled to point out, I was never a bad kid. I got good grades and I stayed out of trouble. Most of the time. But when your older sister happens to be as close to perfection as humanly possible, any transgression, no matter how slight, appears colossal.

  “Okay,” I grumbled, taking slow breaths. My head was still killing me, but at least the nausea was beginning to subside. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Out,” Alicia replied, positioning herself between the tub and toilet to climb to her feet. I wanted to offer her help, but considering my own state, figured it best to hold off.

  “Out? Where? What time is it?”

  “It’s noon, Jordan. You really don’t have any idea what happened last night, do you?”

  I sat there, thinking. My mind felt hazy, like it was stuck between sleep and consciousness. I strained my brain to think about the car. She said it was on Decatur. Why would I have been on Decatur? In all the years I had lived in the Northeast, I rarely made trips to the French Quarter during my vacations back home.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy going there. Any visit to the Quarter would be memorable in one way or another. And always a lot of fun. That was one way Boston and New Orleans were similar. They were both really fun party towns with lots of history. When I first moved to Boston, I took the Samuel Adams Brewery Tour when my college roommate Katie was visiting.

  Although beer was never my alcoholic beverage of choice, Katie wanted to go. It turned out to be a great afternoon. Our tour guide, a robust, goateed twenty-something named Erik, said, in a thick accent, “In Bahston, there’s a bah on every kawnah. If you find yaself somewhere without a bah on every kawnah, you’ve ventured too fah out of town. Come back, we miss you.”

  That comment stuck with me because it was funny and the same could be said about NOLA. While their climates bore no resemblance, at the heart of it, Boston and New Orleans weren’t all that different. Still, as much as I enjoyed the city, I didn’t get there as often as I might have because the people I would spend time with on visits home weren’t really interested in hanging out there. The only person I knew who loved everything about the French Quarter as much as me was—

  “Natalie.”

  “Natalie?” Alicia’s eyes narrowed. She crossed her arms. “As in Natalie Weisman? Are you . . . Jordan, please tell me you weren’t with her last night.”

  Slowly, the events of the previous day began to return to me. I remembered that terrible luncheon, running into Natalie at the coffee shop, and deciding to go to the Quarter with her to “chill” with some of her old friends. After that was a blur of bars, booze, and Bourbon Street. It was definitely a fun night, but, since I rarely drink more than a glass of wine or two anymore, I wasn’t conditioned for so much of it.

  “Jordan? Hello?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Were you with Natalie?” I stared at her, considering how to answer such a weighted question. It was almost comical. Here I was, a twenty-six-year-old woman, living halfway across the country, on my own, yet, at that moment, I might as well have been sixteen again. Sixteen and kind of hung over. “Jordan!”

  “What’s it matter?” I retorted, pulling myself up. On my feet again, I felt a little uneasy, but it wasn’t nearly as bad. With a little luck, I could make it down the hall to my bedroom. Unfortunately, I hadn’t taken two steps before Alicia grabbed my arm. “Hey!”

  “Jordan, you are not getting out of this!”

  I shook her off. When she released me, the sudden movement made me dizzy. I fell back against the wall.

  She rushed forward, grabbing my shoulders in a protective manner. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I grumbled, shrugging her off. “I’m tired. I was out late . . . as you’ve so nicely pointed out . . . I just need sleep.”

  “That’s not what you need. Come on.”

  Before I could argue, I found her leading me out of the bathroom and down the hall to the stairs. For a woman six months pregnant, she handled the steep wooden steps far better than I, even mana
ging somehow to contort herself to aid me in my clumsy descent. Once we reached the first floor, I followed her into the kitchen. Sunlight streamed through the windows. I cowered at the light, fearful it would lead to another horrific headache. Unfazed, Alicia positioned me in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, just out of the sun’s harmful reach.

  “What’re you doing?”

  She didn’t reply. I watched warily as she hurried about the kitchen. She took one of our mother’s environmentally-friendly pots off the rack above the granite-countered island and placed it on the stove. She then ignited the gas burner. A cobalt-blue flame licked the iron burner. I caught a whiff of the gas and gagged. Pouring a can of chicken soup into the pot, she stirred it slowly. Opening another 42-inch, off-white cabinet, she extracted a bowl. Rummaging through the drawers, she located a bottle of aspirin and a spoon. Careful to keep an eye on the simmering soup, she waddled into my mother’s walk-in pantry, which, by the way, was about half the size of my apartment’s kitchen, and far more organized, emerging with a box of soup crackers. From the stainless-steel fridge, she grabbed a bottle of water.

  Before I could blink, she poured the soup into the bowl. She carried it, the crackers, and the water bottle out of the kitchen, through the living room, and into my parents’ dining room. The dining room is easily, besides her kitchen, my mother’s favorite room. When my father had the house built, my mother customized every room, but spent the most time on the kitchen and dining areas.

  The ceiling in the dining room, like the kitchen, was ten feet high, and the floor was made of custom-milled oak planks. My mother has always obsessed over her floors, making sure the cleaning service spent extra time waxing them each week. A real chandelier offered elegant illumination for all our guests and an Elizabethan-style table, which seated ten to twelve people, served as the centerpiece for the room. The walls were papered deep red and a wood-burning fireplace, which was never used, offered charming ambiance on the wall opposite the entry.

  Common sense would dictate a room of this nature be reserved for special occasions, such as family celebrations and holiday gatherings. Unfortunately, common sense doesn’t seem to run in my family. While there is a smaller, more practical table set up in the breakfast nook attached to the kitchen, my mother always insisted we eat our family meals in the formal dining room. Every. Single. Time. Maybe it’s me, but that always seemed kind of weird. I remembered the first time Natalie spent the night way back in first grade.

  My mother decided to order a pizza, it was probably something healthy and holistic, but I digress. When normal kids have sleepovers, they eat pizza and candy on sleeping bags in the living room and watch television until they pass out. Not in my house. My mother insisted that we eat in the formal dining room and then instead of watching television, we played Monopoly, all of us, until ten when she said we needed to go to bed. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy board games as much as the next girl, but when you have a friend staying over, you don’t want to spend the entire evening hanging out with your parents.

  Lucky for me, Natalie wasn’t deterred by the hours of wholesome family fun. As soon as everyone was asleep, she had the bright idea that we should go night swimming. I must admit, my seven-year-old self was terrified at first of being caught, but then excited by the thrill of it. We swam until we were too exhausted to move, and then hung out on the back deck talking until about midnight when we both fell asleep. The early morning sunlight breaking through the tree line first made me aware of our error.

  I remember panicking as I tried to figure out how to get upstairs without getting caught. That’s when my father’s shadow moved across the living room windows. It was about that moment Natalie first stirred, undoubtedly awakened by my hysteria. Squinting up at me, she yawned, stood up, and shoved me back in the pool. The sound of the splash alerted my father to our presence. As my head broke through the rippling waves, I found Natalie treading water and my father staring down at us, a deep frown morphing his tan features.

  I wondered at that moment if that would be the last time I would ever see sunlight. Almost miraculously, however, my father simply assumed he'd caught us sneaking out for an early morning swim. As a result, all we got was a stern lecture. He never knew we had been out all night. That episode taught me something about Natalie. I learned that her natural rebelliousness was matched with an almost preternatural shrewdness.

  “Eat this.” My older sister placed the soup on the table and the water bottle beside it, pulling me from yet another daydream. I looked at the steaming bowl then up at her. Sensing my hesitation, she scowled as she opened the box of crackers and ate a handful. “You need to eat. And drink a lot of water.”

  “Why?”

  “You wanna be hung over all day?” Chomping on another handful, she added, “Take the aspirin, too. It’ll help.”

  “So, since you’re a doctor, you automatically know how to cure a hangover?”

  “No, I’ve had my own fair share.” I stared. “Years ago. Trial and error, Jordan. Eat.”

  “You?” I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. The throbbing in my head returned. I flinched. “Ow!”

  “Serves you right.”

  I opened one eye, massaging my temples.

  Grabbing more crackers, she shook her head. “Take the aspirin and eat the soup. And drink water! It won’t fix the problem, but you’ll feel a lot better.”

  Rolling my eyes for effect, I took two aspirins and gulped down some water. Taking another sip, I gave Alicia an Are you happy now? look. She responded by motioning toward the soup. I frowned. I hated soup, especially of the chicken noodle variety. There are certain things that are synonymous with being sick—crackers, hot tea, popsicles, and soup. The thought of any of those things made me feel worse, although I realized that I was actually kind of hungry.

  “What? What’s wrong now?” I pursed my lips and shrugged. “Jordan, spit it out.”

  “I don’t feel like soup.”

  “Really?” She crossed her arms, shifting her weight. “What exactly do you feel like?”

  “Umm . . .” Cautiously, I lowered myself onto the chair. It was so rigid I had to stretch my back before I could get comfortable. “I kind of feel like . . . a hamburger.”

  “A ham . . . Jordan, you can’t be serious.” Her eyes went from wide with surprise to narrow with agitation. “How in the world do you survive on your own? You can’t eat a hamburger right now . . . it’ll make you sicker!”

  “Actually, it might solve her problem.”

  We both turned toward the voice. I watched my brother-in-law, Charlie Coyle, emerge from the shadows. He was dressed in a three-piece navy suit with a blue-and-yellow striped tie and way-too-shiny brown shoes. Although they had been married for almost three years, I still barely knew my brother-in-law. Our interactions happened during family gatherings and were minimal at best. The most time I spent with him was when he and Alicia came to visit me that past summer and even then, I didn’t exactly have any heart-to-hearts with the man.

  “What?” Alicia sputtered, brushing her brown hair behind her ears. “Charlie, what are you doing here? I thought you had a trial.”

  “The week before Christmas?” He raised an eyebrow. Offering an amused smile, he kissed her. “Continued.”

  “Oh . . . well, that makes sense . . . wait, a hamburger will cure her hangover? What are you talking about? And . . . how do you even know that? You don’t drink!”

  “Now I don’t.” He nodded in agreement, wrapping her up in a warm embrace. “But back in college . . .”

  “What?” My sister’s eyes went wide. She wiggled out of his grasp. “You drank? As in alcohol?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised.” He started to laugh, but she didn’t join in. Relenting, he sighed, taking her hands in his. “Leesh, it’s not a big deal. I wasn’t an alcoholic or anyt
hing . . . just a normal frat guy who had a little too much fun freshman year. When I almost flunked out, I sobered up quick. Are . . . Are you mad at me because I drank? You said you . . .”

  “No! I’m not mad . . . Just surprised. You never struck me as the type.”

  “Believe it or not, I can actually be a fun guy.” When she continued to gape at him, he grinned. Glancing over at me, he winked. “Sounds like you had a little too much fun last night yourself.”

  “Uh . . .” For some reason, the thought of my buttoned-down, lawyer brother-in-law as a drunk frat guy short-circuited the last of the brain cells that survived the night.

  “Yep, you definitely did. If you want a big, greasy, delicious hamburger, I’ll be happy to give you a lift. Kind of in the mood for something fatty myself.”

  At the word “greasy,” my sister gagged. When he added “fatty” to the mix, she turned a pale shade of green. She waddled out of the room, hurrying down the hall to the nearest bathroom. We both watched her and as soon as the door slammed, Charlie let out a stifled laugh. I turned to him in surprise. His expression morphed into one of remorse.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just—” He paused, taking a moment to consider his words in true, lawyerly fashion. “I love your sister. I’ve never loved anyone as much as her. But . . . she can be a little . . . trying . . . at times. And right now . . .” He trailed off, scratching his head. “Well, let’s just say I’m not used to her being so emotional.”

  “You’ve just now seen that? What are you, blind?”

  At that, he let out a deep, bellowing laugh. Loosening his tie, he glanced down at the bowl of soup. He frowned. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “What about Alicia?”